


Think Of Nothing Tonight

by Mohini



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: AU- No Powers, Epilepsy, F/F, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, medical interventions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-21
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-30 16:26:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15755460
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mohini/pseuds/Mohini
Summary: I don’t need a keeper. Never have. I can do this on my own.





	Think Of Nothing Tonight

**Author's Note:**

> Come find me on Tumblr @Mohini-Musing

The days blur into nights and the nights fade back to days. I can’t bring myself to care. Everything revolves around it, the demon in my head, demanding that it be let out, that it be allowed to roam free. I take the pills, I follow the rules, but it doesn’t matter anymore and it takes control when it wants. Deep down, I’m still just the strange immigrant girl with the frequent disappearing acts, the odd mannerisms, and the symbiotic relationship with my twin brother who is even weirder than I am. As a teenager, my classmates dubbed me a witch. I never saw a point to correcting them. In a way, I suppose I am in commune with the devil, just a different sort than they imagined.

Sometimes, I get lucky. There are a few moments warning before I’m headlong into the flashing images and the sudden darkness. Most of the time, I’m not so lucky. There are bruises in varying states of healing, and I don’t leave the house without makeup on anymore. It’s a cruel lover, and it doesn’t believe in mercy.

I don’t mean to let my guard down. I never expected anyone to suspect, least of all her. But here we are in the darkened backstage of the theatre, and she’s got her hand around my wrist, refusing to let go. “Wanda, you’ve got to talk to me, tell me what is going on with you. You’re scaring me.”

I shrug, trying to pull away from her grip and then there’s the flashing of lights at the edges of my vision and I know I’m not going to be able to hide this any longer. “Got to go,” I mutter, yanking my arm away and trying my best to get somewhere, anywhere, before it all goes to hell.

I wake with my head in her lap, fingers carding slowly through my hair. “Welcome back,” she says softly. I laugh, but there is no mirth there. 

“How long?” she asks.

“All my life,” I whisper. “The, um, the meds used to work. Controlled it or whatever. Not so much now. I’m on something new, but it doesn’t do shit and I have another week before they’ll try anything different.”

“How did I not know?”

“I didn’t want you to.”

“We’ll discuss this later. You okay for now?”

“Yeah. You?”

“Not the first time I’ve seen one,” she says quietly. “You’ll have to do better than that to scare me.”

I don’t think about the implications of that statement, just struggle into a sitting position and then force myself onto my feet. I sway, fighting for balance and she’s got an arm around my waist almost instantly. 

“Easy there, you were down a good ten minutes after it stopped. Give yourself a sec to breathe, alright? You know the number game, right?”

“Mmhmm,” I mumble.

“How about we play, then. Give me a number. How dizzy are you?”

“Four,” I whisper.

“Good girl. I’m going to hold onto you a bit longer until that goes down a little more. You cluster or one and done?”

“Done,” I tell her. I don’t tell her that I usually wait for it to happen at home before I go out, so that this doesn’t happen in front of people. I don’t tell her that this is my second one today. She doesn’t need to know that.

“You’re shaking. Hurting or normal post-ictal?”

“Normal, it’ll fade,” I tell her, trying to ignore the way she is guiding me into one of the unused practice rooms. I sink onto the vinyl covered bench when we reach it, give up all pretense of being in control when she continues to hold me up, sitting beside me and guiding me until I’m lying with my head on her legs.

“Close your eyes, rest a bit longer. You’re a wreck, love. We’ve an hour yet before first call, no one will notice for a while that we’re not out there. Just rest,” she instructs. Impossibly, I obey, my eyes closing and my mind shutting down. I’m so tired. So very, very tired. 

I wake to her voice a while later. She tells me we need to get going, that she’s let me sleep as long as she can but we need to get to the dressing rooms soon. I nod, stand on blessedly stable legs and thank her. “We’ll talk about this later,” she tells me. 

I go to the costume room. I gather my clothing, strip down in a dressing room and redress in the ridiculous linen shift that I’m stuck in for this show. I wrap the outer garment over myself; slip my feet into the leather cording of lyrical shoes. Mary Magdalene, that’s the part I’m playing tonight. I take the stage, sing my songs, dance my way through blocking that’s burned into my muscles. I’m exhausted. I sit against the wall each time I come off the stage.

I dig through my purse for a small amber bottle, dry swallowing an ativan before turning to leave the dressing room after the show is finished. I nearly walk into her. “What happened to one and done?” she asks quietly.

“I won’t have another GTC,” I counter. “But I’m tired, and partials come when they want. No sense tempting fate.”

“Mmhmm,” she says. 

“You told my brother,” I say. My phone had several texts waiting for me when I checked it during intermission. It’s not that I expected her not to, but it still stings that she felt the need to report to him. 

“He says not to worry about you, that you’re good on your own. So is he right? You don’t look it to me, but I’ll let it go if you ask me to.”

I struggle with the answer. I want to tell her to forget what she saw. Not that that’s likely to happen. I saw one of my seizures on video once. It’s fucking terrifying to watch. Definitely not something easy to forget you’ve seen. She reaches out one hand, places it against my face and leans in for a chaste kiss. 

“It doesn’t change anything,” she tells me. 

“It changes everything.”

I’ve seen that look before. That desire to take care of me, to baby me and shepherd me. Saw it on my mother’s face when I was a kid. Saw it on my first college roommate’s face when I seized in front of her during finals week after getting an hour of sleep a night for three nights in a row thanks to too many papers and too much studying. I saw it on the face of my first long term girlfriend, and that’s the reason I’ve never lived with another. I don’t need a keeper. Never have. I can do this on my own. 

“We aren’t meant for solitary existence,” she says, her voice little more than a whisper. I shrug. I’m not so sure of that. Seclusion is far better than being watched as though every blink of an eye is a precursor to falling to the ground and flailing. 

“I am,” I tell her quietly. I pull away, walking past her and out of the room. She doesn’t follow. I take an Uber home. The sole concession to this fucking disease is the lack of driver’s license in my purse. When I get there, my brother is waiting for me. I let him hold me, allow him to wipe the tears when I cry for the utter hatefulness of it all. I don’t want to be this person. I don’t know how not to be. 

I crawl into my bed hours later, and I hear the sounds of him making himself a space to sleep on the sofa. It’s been this way for years. When I am out of control, he stays with me, to make sure I’m safe, or at least as safe as I get when the demons in my skull vie for freedom at every opportunity. 

It’s just past dawn when I wake, my left side aching. I know I’ve probably had a seizure in my sleep. It happens frequently, even when I am otherwise well controlled. I call his name, my head spinning and I know I don’t have long before another one hits. He’s there a moment later, and I don’t fight him when he pulls the concentrator from the closet and slips the stupid, hated oxygen tubing onto my face. A moment later he’s wrapping a sensor around my toe, hooking it to a monitor, which he turns on and examines for a moment, silencing the sound. He knows how much I hate hearing the damn thing beep. He opens the bedside drawer, pulls out the leather kit I keep there, unzips it and lays out what he will need if this gets bad.

Then he sits with me, pulling his phone out of his pocket and reading his email, purposely avoiding mother henning me while staying close by. I love him for it. I wish it were possible for him to teach someone else to do the same. To teach anyone else to do the same. But I know it isn’t. He gets me on a level no one else ever will, and for that I both love and hate him. They say that twins can read one another’s mind. I’m not sure about that, but we definitely have a connection. 

I close my eyes and try to relax. I’m either going to cluster the hell out of some partials or I’m heading into a mother fucker of a gran mal. The terminology has changed since I was a child, the medical establishment calling them generalized tonic clonics now. But the old language sticks with me, much as the accent that refuses to fade from my speech. Then I smell it, the telltale scent of roses. Ugh. Gran mal it is. I tell him as much, and he nods absently, one hand reaching out to hold mine as he continues looking at his phone. He knows how much I hate being stared at. I hate the waiting, knowing what’s coming, and having absolutely no control. In that way, I almost prefer the ones that come out of nowhere. At least then I don’t have time to get scared.

I feel the edges of my vision begin to collapse in as my body takes on the heaviness that has long warned me that it’s going to be a bad one. I can’t talk anymore, can’t control my mouth, but I do my best to squeeze his hand in mine, hoping he understands. I feel his weight shift on the bed, and he gently tugs me further down the mattress, safely away from the wall at the head. I’ve broken bones seizing before. He scoots a little further from me, and I remember vaguely that the bones haven’t always been mine. 

Then it’s there, the movement starting in my left foot, the toes curling painfully downward and then up, my leg joining the party in short order. I was wrong, this is the worst part. The slow march of the tremors as they take over my body against any and all objections on my part. I pray that they will reach my shoulders quickly. From there I nearly always lose awareness, even in this vague, disjointed way I am currently feeling my body. 

When I wake, the first thing I’m aware of is the hiss of the oxygen tubing in my nose. The dry air is moving at a hell of a clip, which tells me I dropped my sats badly. Thinking anything further is too damn hard, though, so I give in to the darkness and stop trying. 

I come around again minutes or hours later, and he’s sitting there beside me, phone in his hand as it had been before it began. I struggle to squeeze his hand, the one that is still loosely holding mine. He turns to look at me at the slight pressure I’m able to manage. 

“Ten minutes. Took you a while to respond to the Versed. How’re you feeling?” he asks quietly. I can feel the bitter bite deep in my sinuses of the medication he used to stop the convulsions. I blink, once, twice, three times, slowly and deliberately. It’s the code we’ve used forever. I know, in the deepest pit of knowledge, that it’s not over yet. I’m too out of it. This isn’t post-ictal recovery. This is the quiet in the midst of a storm. 

“Do you want me to access you?”

Two slow blinks. I try to speak, but the sound won’t cooperate and all that comes out is a garbled moan. He understands anyway. He leaves my side for a few moments, returning with the necessary equipment. He pushes my shirt up to my armpits and then slips it gently over my head. A mask is placed over my mouth and nose, and then there’s the chill of the cleansing sponge, chlorhexidine preparing my skin for the needle. I barely feel it as it goes in, and then he’s taping it in place and securing the dressing over my now accessed port. He tapes both lumens down at my sternum, safely secured and ready for use. Three GTCs in under 24 hours. One requiring rescue meds. If I have another, it’s not going to stop on its own, and chances are damn high it’s going to mean status. My veins are shot from 28 years of this shit, and accessing me as a precaution has been our normal for nearly a decade. At least this way my arms won’t be butchered from EMTs trying to thread a line into a thrashing limb if he has to call the squad.

He pulls my shirt back down, gently repositioning me on the bed. I fumble for his hand, and he takes mine in it, squeezing in silent reassurance. I’ve lived with this so long that it’s easy to pretend everything is fine, to put on the smile and the mask and convince everyone there is nothing to see here. I’m very, very good at what I do. In this moment, though, in this waiting period between seizures, while my body turns on me and traps me motionless here in the bed, my muscles burning still and the aura prickling at the edges of my consciousness, I’m a scared little girl, hoping against hope that I’m wrong.

I fade into sleep, the exhaustion making itself known. When I next wake, the first thing I’m aware of is that there is a tube in my throat. Damn. I force the panic down, knowing from long experience that they’ll extubate me once I can prove I’m conscious and safe. If I’m awake now, chances are good it isn’t the first time, but that I’ve drifted in and out without memory for at least a few points in the recent past. There is a hand covering mine, and I squeeze his familiar fingers.

“Welcome back,” he says quietly. I turn my head to look at him, the movement requiring a lot more effort than it should. I can feel the itchy probes adhered to my head, and I know it’s been bad. I hear the electronic static of the call button, know that he has summoned a nurse to document my waking. “Three days,” he says by way of explanation. “Propafol and pentobarb drip finally did the job. You’re still on a little Pentobarb, should come off tonight. Active status for two hours. Kept you under until we got good control, though. You were having breakthrough GTCs until last night. Think we got your meds right, though.”

A few moments later, I’m being prodded and examined by the nurse, a young woman who has soft, cold hands and a quiet voice. She repeats what Pietro has already told me. When she finally leaves, telling me as she goes that the doctors will be in soon to see if I’m good to extubate I turn to look at Pietro again. I raise one hand, painstakingly spelling out the letters of her name with my fingers trembling, grateful for the thousandth time that he decided we needed to learn to sign after the first time I ended up on the vent, back when we were only teenagers.

“She’s called, texted, emailed. I’ve told her you’re not awake yet, but that I’ll let her know once you are. She knows you don’t do visitors when you can’t talk. She’s not happy about it, but she says she’ll respect it until you’re down a few tubes. Might actually be worth keeping around, this one, you know?” He tells me. I squeeze his hand in answer. I can’t, I just can’t. He’s the only one I allow to see me like this, helpless and hooked to tubes and wires. I can feel the catheter that drains to a bag hung on the bed, can feel the cool fluids dripping into my lines, the intermittent pressure of the blood pressure cuff inflating and relaxing around my bicep, and I can’t stand the idea of her seeing it. If I didn’t look helpless and in need of rescue before, I know I do now. I can’t do it. I just can’t.

A moment later I am inundated by a team of medical folks, lights shining into my eyes, the requests that I push against their palms with my own hands, with my feet, that I follow their fingers with my eyes. I’m told in slow, measured sentences that they will lower the supports on the vent gradually and remove it when I can prove that my respiratory drive won’t tank. I want to tell them I’m not an idiot, that this isn’t the first time this has happened. Instead I just nod, eyes falling shut of their own accord. 

Time is fluid thanks to the pentobarbitol still running through my veins. I drift in and out a couple more times before I’m finally congratulated on breathing well enough over the vent to be extubated. I’m told to take a deep breath and cough as the damnable tube is pulled steadily from my throat. I cough and gag afterwards for what feels like an eternity. My throat burns, and Pietro is fast to suction my mouth out with the yankauer he produces seemingly from nowhere. When my gag reflex settles back down, I breathe shakily and answer questions in a raspy voice that scratches and drags on the way out. Standard battery: time, place, condition, orientation questions. Just making sure I haven’t fried too many brain cells this time around. I’m off on day, manage to miss a number in the 20-1 countback, and am exhausted by the time they leave me alone. 

The next time I wake, the hand holding mine is smaller, softer. I want to be angry, to bluster and yell and tell them they had no right. I didn’t want her to see this. To see me. To see it. A finger swipes under my eye, wiping away moisture that gathers without my permission. I force myself to say it, to speak her name, to acknowledge that this is real and that she’s come despite all logic. “Tasha,” I whisper, and the ache the ET tube left in my throat is better but still very much at the forefront of awareness. 

“Shh,” she tells me. “Rest. I’m not going anywhere. I told you before, it’s going to take a lot more than this to scare me off.”


End file.
